For several songs, Nate Largent had been sitting in behind the kit for Future Prezidents, one of the bands long scheduled to play Lake Worth’s Bamboo Room for a Saturday reggae night. But now, another man leaned over the microphone, trying to explain the occasion, to make some sense of the reason that the scheduled drummer wasn’t there keeping the beat. And while he did say a few words, C.J. Jones preferred to communicate in another language, one he shared with his brother Corey.

“I brought these for a reason,” Jones said, holding a shiny pair of wooden drumsticks above his head before climbing behind the kit to sit in for his brother, who wasn’t there with his band because he was killed just seven days earlier during a still-mysterious encounter with a Palm Beach Gardens police officer.